How (And Why You Should) Eat With Your Family, Without Getting Distracted

I stared at the child, wondering when he would ever run out of energy. We were at Saizeriya, and he kept getting out of his seat, even though we had gotten everything he wanted to eat.

Fries, burger, chips, you name it, we got it.

But he still didn’t want to listen.

He just wanted to get away from us.

When would he ever stop? Why couldn’t he stop?

Finally came the time when I could hand him over to his mother, and wave goodbye.

That night, sitting on the bus, I just couldn’t think. My brain could not move, even though I tried my best to do something productive. Read a book, write my journal, but nothing would flow.

As a parent, it often feels like this. Your child not listening, and doing what you’d like.

Often our first instinct is to find out what the best way to manage our child is by Googling for a quick answer. But perhaps a different perspective you’d like to consider today is,

What if the problem wasn’t just my child,

but with me?

That’s a scary question.

Finding the answer to that requires us to think more deeply about who we are as parents, rather than who our child is becoming.

The myth of the problem child

It’s much easier to look at what’s wrong with our child, rather than what’s wrong with us.

Mind you, I’m not saying you’re a bad parent. But I’m saying that your child is young, immature, and might not have the same level of emotional development as you have.

That’s why when we see our child behave in an undesirable way, we don’t pause to think,

hey, maybe he’s just not grown up, yet.

The key word there is ‘yet’.

But we look at our child as we are, rather than as the child is.

But, as parents, we have. At least, on the surface, it looks like we have. Therefore, it’s important for us to look at how we can be more aware of our parenting.

Why aren’t we more aware?

But this advice sounds too simple to be true.

Be more aware? Anyone can do that!

The usual suspects that stop us from being more aware is something we’ve heard many times – social media, our phones, our work.

 I’m not here to beat you on the head to get you to put all of that aside.

But what’s often missed in our journey to being a more mindful parent, is our own internal discomfort with looking within.

Here, the often contradictory advice from beloved mindfulness meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein is,

don’t just do something, sit there!

Carmen Teo was a high-flying consultant advising big corporations on how to make more money. But as she was doing that, she started learning mindfulness to better manage the stress of constantly delivering a high level of performance.

For her, being mindful started with sitting down and simply observing what was going on within her. That was a difficult move, especially when she had always been on the move.

But slowly, this practice of sitting down and observing what happened within her moved her to see the incongruence between her work, and how she wanted to live.

It helped her to make mindful adjustments to be more present with her loved ones.

Just like Carmen, many of us are in a workplace that demands high levels of performance from us on a daily basis. Sometimes, it’s hard to dissociate our work from the times we are back at home with our children.

We fail to realise that they need time and space with us, and not another parenting performance. They need you, the parent, and not you, the worker.

How do we do this?

When I was a social work student in training in the U.K., I complained to my professor about how hard it was to calm down after a long day of work. I would constantly think of my clients, and be unable to be fully present with my loved ones.

Change your clothes

He gave me some strange advice.

Change your clothes.

When I used to help those with mental health needs, I would change my clothes after a long day of work.

That physical change in clothes helped him to have a physical change in mindset. Just being out of the work clothes he wore led him to see that he could now relax into his pyjamas, and simply be more present with his loved ones.

But it also led him to see that after so much stimulus in his daily work, it was hard to wind down and get used to the boredom of just sitting at the table with his partner. Sometimes, there was nothing to talk about, and they would have to dig into their dinners in silence.

Eat with your family

Eating spaghetti and being confronted with your children around a humid dining table may not be very attractive.

But it forces you to show up as a parent. Over Chinese New Year, I was asking my uncle how he dealt with his children. Why didn’t they seem addicted to their phones? How did he get them to be so comfortable with silence, and not having to check their phones at every moment of the day.

He shared with me that as a family, they had made it a practice to be home for dinner from Monday to Friday, unless there was a serious work issue.

Promptly at 7pm, they would sit at the table, and eat.

No phones at the table, just dinner, and conversation.

It forced their children to learn how to converse, rather than just ‘connecting’ on a surface level. As Sherry Turkle argues in her beautiful book Alone Together,

“Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology.

And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.”

My uncle moved his children from the comfort of merely connecting, to the harder work of conversing. Real-time conversation is difficult, messy, and unpredictable. And learning to be a parent is about (re)learning how to put away that phone, and to truly converse with our child.

The days are long, but the years are short

Recently a parent said to me,

John, after parenting two kids, you will realise that the days are long, but the days are short.

What this means is that when you’re stuck with the child, who’s crying at night, being unable to sleep, the days will feel particularly long.

But before long, you will realise that the child has outgrown that, and is now a taller primary school student.

It will disappear fast, before you expect it.

Being a more present parent isn’t just another self-help technique to help your child to perform better.

But it’s to help you to enjoy the limited time you have with your child. Your child, means a lot to you (or at least I hope).

Children are smart, and precocious. They see and understand more than we expect them to.

We’ve all had the experience when we pause and wonder,

how did my child know that?

Two years ago, when I worked with a child who was ‘addicted’ to mobile games, he asked me a point-blank question.

Why can’t I play with the phone if my father is on his phone all the time?

I didn’t have an answer for him.

But my heart went out to him.

As parents, I don’t think any of us start wanting to be a ‘bad’ parent. We are all trying our best with what we know. Along the way, we realise that some things don’t work, and our children don’t seem to be behaving in the way that we want them to. Often, our quickest intervention is to control them by taking away their phones and privileges. But we rarely pause to ask ourselves,

what if the problem wasn’t with my child?

What’s my part in this?

Reflecting on that might bring us to greater awareness as parents, and to eventually become a more present parent. Not because you need to, but because your child needs you.

Last Updated on 14 November 2024

John.Lim

John is a registered social worker who has worked with hundreds of parents at a Family Service Centre, and is the author behind Take Heart, which helps young people better deal with their emotions.

www.savethesocialworker.com/